


peace will win, fear will lose

by Cyane (orphan_account)



Category: Twenty One Pilots
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Angst with a Happy Ending, Dark, Demonic Possession, Guardian Angels, Heavy Angst, M/M, Mental Instability, Mutilation, Prompt Fill, Schizophrenia, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred, Short One Shot, lame ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-25
Updated: 2016-09-25
Packaged: 2018-08-17 07:15:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8135026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Cyane
Summary: Josh is Tyler's guardian angel who breaks all of the rules, and literally falls for him.





	

Demons can only come out at night. 

It's the one weakness they have- while the angels can fly around and send goodness during the long hours of the day and throughout the night, protect their loved ones from the demons- the darker ghosts are only available when the sun sets and from then until it rises once again.

But it is the _only_ weakness, as they are much stronger than angels and in the battles of the night, very rarely do angels win. 

There were rules for angels. It's what made them good ghosts, it's what made them human, it's what brought them apart from the demons. They had rules and regulations, keeping themselves in line so that chaos wasn't everywhere.

The first rule: never reveal yourself to humans. Angels could only reveal themselves if they wanted to, and while demons were always aware of their location, humans could only see them if the angel chose to reveal themselves.

The second rule: never kill the demon. Although it was a controversial topic in heaven, almost taboo, really, it was enforced heavily. Angels were not allowed to kill anything, even demons. 

The third rule: never, _never_ fall in love with your assignment, whether it be the human you protect, or the demon you take care of. Falling in love with a demon would be absolute madness- a failure from the beginning. Falling in love with a human... that could bring unforeseen consequences. 

If angels broke any of these rules, they were stripped of their titles and cast out of heaven, bound to the Earth forever, an outcast to all the societies. Fallen angels, they were called. And fallen angels had no chance at becoming an angel again. They would never have a guardian angel of their own.

So most good ghosts followed the rules.

Josh Dun became an angel at twenty-two, after dying in a car crash. Obviously he immediately went to become the guardian angel to his family, but unfortunately they died shortly thereafter in a terrorist bombing. It was nice to see them again afterwards, with the exception of his father, who wasn't in heaven. 

(Angels weren't supposed to talk about those who had gone to hell, though... it was dishonorable.)

Most of his living friends had their own guardian angels, mostly consisting of his old friends who had left before he had.

Josh didn't have anyone to protect, which in of itself was an extremely odd occurrence. The higher angels had explained to him that he would have to find someone to protect. He searched for weeks. Everyone had problems, yes, but Josh wasn't searching for someone with problems like 'got a bad haircut' or 'breakup issues'. He wanted to protect someone who was being possessed, or getting harassed by demons.

He wanted to make an actual difference in someone's life.

Which is about the time he found Tyler Joseph. 

It was the middle of the day when he found the twenty-one year old, sitting in the back of his closet, shaking and whispering things under his breath, in a full-out panic attack. 

Josh was stunned, at first, because it was _noon_ and demons couldn't come out for at least another seven hours, and from the looks of it, Tyler was already possessed. So he placed his intangible hand on Tyler's shoulder and filed through his thoughts, sending relaxation and calmness through his hand.

Tyler's thoughts were like lightning.

"He's coming!" Tyler was shuddering. "Don't- go away, go away! Shut up, go away, leave me alone! Leave me alone!"

Josh stopped his search and placed his other hand on Tyler's forehead and pushed calming emotions through the bond he had created. In a sick, twisted sort of way, Josh was excited that he finally had found a human with a demon. By the sound of it, a demon that came to him regularly. 

A sort of fascination mixed with pity. Josh couldn't help but see humans as animals, now. Small mice or test subjects, unknowing of the world(s) around them. It all changes when you die and realize that humans are never really alone, that they just can't see or hear the beings around them.

After a few minutes, Tyler's thoughts started to slow down. 

Josh told him to sleep, and the boy slept. 

Two hours later, and Josh was talking to the higher angels, requesting his assignment to be Tyler Joseph. They raked through files and files, telling him that Tyler had several severe mental illnesses, his demon had already possessed him, and that Tyler had no family or friends that were both dead and in heaven; therefore, no guardian angel, and therefore an open assignment. 

Request accepted.

It was his first assignment, too, and he could tell some of the other angels were wary of him- from both his personal appearance (red hair?), and his personality (slightly darker mental state). But he was bound and determined.

He went back to Tyler's apartment to make sure he was still alright at six o'clock, and ended up calming him down again, putting him to sleep, again, and waiting for his demon to show up. The sunset took a long time, inching below the horizon. And then came the moon, rising above the clouds.

In fact, Josh was so focused on taking in everything about Tyler- his face, the tattoos dotting his arms, his hair, the lines covering his skin, the thoughts brewing just below his forehead- that he didn't even notice the dark presence of the demon behind him until it was standing on the other side of the bed, on the other side of Tyler.

"First day on the job?!" It hissed.

Immediately Josh froze, because the demon _was Tyler_ \- only with red eyes and blurry edges. And then he jumped up. "Yeah. And I plan on making it your last. Beat it."

"So rude..." The demon purred. "After all this time, so much fun I've had with Tyler... and you didn't even knew him before you died, did you?"

Josh scowled. "Get out of here, _now_. I'm his guardian, now."

Tyler shifted in the bed and moaned in pain, making Josh's breath hitch in worry. His lip curled in rage. "Leave him alone."

Tyler's demon laughed. "The moon is up, angel. You can't stop me. He's mine. I've already possessed him."

The demon placed one hand on the sleeping boy, who immediately woke up with a gasp and a scream, and Josh ran forward, trying to pry his hand away from Tyler. Unfortunately, it is well known that demons are much stronger than angels, especially when they've already possessed a human.

And when the sun came back up, and the moon faded away, Josh had never felt so much like a failure. Blurryface- that was the demon's name- slowly left, still laughing wildly, still taking the form of Tyler, while the real Tyler lay on the bed, shaking and whimpering and wondering why the hell he hated himself so much, why he heard these voices in his head, why why why. 

Once the sun rose and the demon left, Josh stood up from the ground that Blurryface had thrown him on, placed a hand on Tyler's forehead, trying to send calming thoughts as the darkness of the night was chased away. 

The first nights were always the worst.

But after that, they never stopped. Tyler was always arching his back and screaming into the pillows, Blurryface was always tossing Josh aside and winning in every sense of the word, and Josh was always failing to do his job until morning, when he could only hope to undo some of the damage that had been done.

The aftermath. 

Night after night, day after day, and nothing seemed to be getting better. Tyler's thoughts got darker, his mind got fuzzier. The faint lines Josh had seen became gaping, bleeding slices again, deeper and more dangerous. 

Josh had started talking to Tyler, started actually speaking so that the boy could hear him, whispering things into his ear and smoothing down his hair and holding him close. And although at first, Tyler had been shocked that one of the voices in his head wasn't trying to kill him, it calmed him down.

But Josh had let Tyler know he was there. He had broken the first rule.

"You can't stop me," Blurryface taunted. "He belongs to me, he's _mine_ -"

And after months of this happening, months of Josh trying whatever he could to save the boy he had found himself getting closer to. It wasn't just pity- no. In the midday hours, before Tyler started getting anxious about the upcoming night, and after the early morning where Tyler still struggled to get past the previous night, Josh had seen an entirely different side of the boy.

Love was a dangerous word. It was an even more dangerous thing, really. 

But Josh knew, down in his heart, that he had made a mistake; that he had fallen in love with a human. An assignment. He no longer saw the animal, the lab rat, the paperwork- he only saw Tyler Joseph. Tyler who sang himself to sleep, sometimes. Who played the piano and the ukulele, who wrote poetry that was so in depth. Tyler; with the tattoos. 

Rule number three had been broken.

It got worse in the following weeks- and soon Josh ached for requited love, he ached to be seen, to actually comfort Tyler and let him know who he was. He ached to wrap his hands around Blurryface's throat and slit it with the holy weapons of heaven. He ached for things that were so utterly wrong in the eyes of ghosts that he knew, one way or another, he was destined to be a fallen angel.

(Or perhaps he only convinced himself what his destiny was so that he could break the rules and show Tyler who he really was.)

So on one particularly bad Friday night, Josh wrapped his hands around the demon's neck, just as he had pictured it in his mind, and _squeezed_. Like a boa constrictor, strangling prey, literally squeezing the breath- the life- out of it's victims. This wasn't how angels behaved.

Josh was slowly falling from the sky. 

And when Tyler's mindset slowly started to clear without medication, the human was shocked. When he wasn't feeling worthlessness and guilt every night, when he didn't have the fighting, biting urge to grab the razor and dig it into his forearms and stomach. 

When the voices in his head stopped following him around, and slowly but surely, the night didn't look so bleak. He could see the moon without launching into an anxiety attack, he could think about nighttime without sobbing into his hands, he could still breathe when he woke up. 

And while Tyler got better, Josh was digging a stolen blade into the demon's neck, when Blurryface was already days gone by dead. 

Breaking the second rule.

Josh broke all the rules.

The higher angels showed up the following day, fully equipped. They made a show of it, too. They used the blade that Josh had struck down the demon with to cut off his wings, leaving him to scream at the empty sockets on his back. They took away the abilities he had been granted after he died. 

They threw him to the Earth.  
Tyler didn't hear from his guardian angel for three weeks, and slowly he declined again, missing the friend he had made in his head. Missing the one who brought him out of reality and kept him hooked onto it at the same time.

It took time, yes. But Josh had seen the Arial view of the place, and so when he knocked on the apartment door, he knew that Tyler lived there.

It took five knocks for Tyler to open the door.

"...Yes?" He croaked.

Josh swallowed heavily. "Tyler-" He started, watching Tyler's entire face contort in shock.

" _You..._ " The younger boy started. "You're... you were in my head..."

And Josh threw himself forward as Tyler stepped forward and they wrapped their arms around one another and Josh ignored the stinging pain on his back, running his now-human hands through Tyler's hair and crying into it.  
"I was never in your head, Tyler... I was always with you, I was always... _always_..."

"Thank you," Tyler whispered.

**Author's Note:**

> Confusing story, lame ending, OOC characters, yeah.  
> I live on that shit.
> 
> Comment feedback, if you please, and if you liked this crazy shit then please leave comments. <3 Love you all, stay alive.


End file.
